Review by: Jager

Rating: 7 out of 10

In this game you can duke it out as one of 10 giant monsters, and when I say giant, I mean giant. We're talkin' King Kong vs Godzilla here!

This game is one of the better fighting games of the year in concept and design but the controls left me wanting. The basic idea of the game is that aliens are attacking earth and finally we manage to shoot them down. Unfortunately, radioactive ooze leaks from the ships and causes animals to grow and mutate to become said monsters (ed note: ofcourse).

The game has a nice campy feel in menu design. You are in a drive in theater choosing your monster and level. The graphics are beautiful. The developers at Incog have taken the Twisted Metal: Black engine and really put it to work! The monsters are great and the cityscapes are really sweet! You can climb buildings; throw cars, radio antennae, boats, pieces of broken buildings, anything really. This is a skill you will want to learn very quickly, because your survival depends on it. Everything, and I mean everything on the 13 levels can be destroyed. You can take time and just demolish the whole city if you want. I can't forget to mention the 4 mini-games that are unlockable. Dodge ball is my favorite!

But there are some problems with the game. When in the heat of battle I didn't really feel in control of my monster. The controls are sloppy at best. Quite often I would ask my friend how he pulled off a combo and he would say I don't know. And that's how it went. Button mashing could get you pretty far in this game if you knew when to mash and when to hide or throw objects. The frame rate seemed constant even in the thickest of battles. Also, I wish the developers would have taken the time to put in four player action. That would have taken it to another level. If you have someone you can play with this game is much more fun than the one player adventure. It gets monotonous very quickly.

Overall, War of the Monsters™ is a fun, offbeat fighting game, but I just couldn't get into it as much as others. It's not as deep as Virtua Fighter 4 or Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, but its quirkiness makes up for it. Except for the control issues, which to me are very important.

Jager
It goes in, it comes out